Physically Fit, a political cartoon by Henry Glintenkamp 1917
Each week, I get hundreds and hundreds of hits just on this one article alone -- other articles that get as much or more views either involve the unaccountable Jacob Appelbaum or how to get blue tint out of your screen.
But I've found the appetite for smugly telling your fellow Internet arguer that those who sacrifice freedom for security will get neither is absolutely ENDLESS.
Each person who pulls it out in a twit-fight seems to think they alone have wittily discovered it.
And I think there's a growing cohort of people wanting to question this quote, to see if it is true, and what it means, hence the traffic to that debate.
Many of the people invoking this quote on the "progressive" side of the aisle seem to have no clue that Benjamin Franklin was not only for owning guns -- he was for using them on Native Americans if need be.
And many of the libertarians trying to invoke this quote ahistorically as well don't seem to have a grasp of Franklin's notion of a society that is free precisely because it has security from the marauders and Kings' soldiers and natives that threaten it -- and that his quotation was more about the best way to gain security regarding the colonial overlords and the new colonies, not some abstract pitting of safety aganist speaking one's mind.
Ben Franklin with his quaint kite trying to catch a lighting bolt is worlds and worlds apart from the Internet set.
He would never even been able to imagine some young buck stealing all the secret correspondence of the government -- and running to an enemy power with it. The sheer speed of the event would be beyond his ken. He would most definitely not think this was just some important "national conversation" to have -- something to attach to the correspondence sent around the colonies or put in the Farmer's Almanac. He would have been terrified at the implications of this world, I think, as inventive as he was.
I really get so sick and tired of this quote being wielded and I laugh out loud every day I check the overview of my blog and see the droves of people keen to debate this even more ferociously (as you can see in the comments there).
Not a single person viciously slamming others with this quote ever seem to conceive of the balance aspect of it that in fact drove Ben Franklin to make his remarks in his context -- a balance utterly missing from the freaks who think it's more than fine to steal millions of classified files and dump them everywhere just because they can.
That was why it was nice to get a new quotation for a change in this endless debate in which so many technocommunists meet their bedfellows among the technolibertarians and smash the moderate middle.
Here's "Gary in VA" commenting in The New York Times, quoting Learned Hand, and asking the same question I've been asking about where the cases are in the Snowden affair:
I have yet to see even one instance where tangible harm occurred due to loss of "privacy" in the N.S.A. effort. If we now live in a "police state," please tell me who the police are unlawfully arresting.
What I do think about is the image of the child blown up by terrorists at the Boston Marathon. His right to life should trump your right to "privacy."
Years ago a federal judge named Learned Hand wrote something I wish my libertarian/anarchist friends would consider:
"And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few - as we have learned to our sorrow."
Aug. 9, 2013 at 12:33 a.m.
An important thing to remember about Learned Hand was that he was no conservative -- and in fact, ruled to protect freedom of the press as the US entered World War I, when the government wanted to ban a revolutionary magazine:
Hand made his most memorable decision of the war in 1917 in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten.[81] After the country joined the war, Congress had enacted an Espionage Act that made it a federal crime to hinder the war effort. The first test of the new law came two weeks later when the postmaster of New York City refused to deliver the August issue of The Masses, a self-described "revolutionary journal". The edition contained drawings, cartoons, and articles criticizing the government's decision to go to war.[82]
The publishing company sought an injunction to prevent the ban, and the case came before Judge Hand.[83] In July 1917, he ruled that the journal should not be barred from distribution through the mail. Though The Masses supported those who refused to serve in the forces, its text did not, in Hand's view, tell readers that they must violate the law. Hand argued that suspect material should be judged on what he called an "incitement test": only if its language directly urged readers to violate the law was it seditious—otherwise freedom of speech should be protected.[84] This focus on the words themselves, rather than on their effect, was novel and daring; but Hand's decision was promptly stayed, and later overturned on appeal.[85]
Later, his distinction regarding "imminence" or immediacy found its way into law as Brandenberg v. Ohio. This Supreme Court protection of speech, is, of course, the thin membrane behind which Julian Assange or Bradley Manning might hide if only the free speech aspect of their actions is regarded (and of course, that's not all there is to their cases, and they are not free-speech heros or journalists).
Hand went on to fight red-baiting, protecting socialist dissent, and so on. That's why his quote here about security is so important -- he was a very vigorous free speech combatant.
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